2010 April

Q….Ideas that create a better world?

April 29, 2010 by Tripp Fuller 4 Comments

My buddy and HBC Deacon Davis is at the Q conference in Chicago. He is one cool progressive baptist minister and fellow Demon Deacon graduate. Here are his reflections…..

I have heard the term “justification by faith” more times in the past five hours than I have in the past five years. Not to mention the term “double imputation” which I am guessing weaves its way back to some kind of penal substitutionary atonement. Am I in the right room???

After my initial shock and subsequent regrouping, I have gathered a few reflections from Day One of the Q Conference in Chicago!

1 – Evangelicals are preaching social justice!?! Could this be a fatal blow to the mainline Protestants who preach social justice? Liberal strands of Christianity has always included social justice in the message of Christ…we are just not very good at actually doing it. We’ll see if the evangelicals can do any better. But after listening to the speakers, I think they might beat us at our own game.

2. The table is bigger than I had thought it would be…but still not big enough. So here is a run-down of WINNERS and LOSERS who are at least at the table on Day One at the Q:

The leader of a gay ministry in Chi-town asks the church leaders present to let loose their holds of the proverbial “gatekeys.” He gets 2 minutes to speak. The guy who wants to convert the 1.57 billion Muslims, he gets 9 minutes. WINNER = the leader of the gay ministry with the rainbow color backdrop; the missionary to the Muslims has been at this table for a long time.

Scott McKnight gets 20 minutes to compel his audience not to confuse the plan of salvation with the narrative of Jesus Christ, what he would define the “Gospel.” Going one step further, he even asks them to let the narrative overshadow their coveted salvation plan! His very spotty reading of Paul as “story-teller” of Jesus, 1 Corinthians 15 only goes so far as “story”, and his assertion that Jesus proclaimed himself, John 14:6 only goes so far as well notwithstanding, WINNER = Evangelicals.

Doug Pagitt is on the sidelines as a table leader when he should be a speaker at this conference, WINNER = no one!

And finally – the Christian subculture of tight jeans, wacky hair that actually takes a lot of time to prepare in the morning, plastic rim glasses, designer shoes, and the I am different than you…and telling you how to “do” church, WINNER = certainly not my 60 year old colleague who dresses in ties, slacks and nursing shoes, at least they look like nursing shoes.

My suggestions after Day One, just keep making room, (and hey, at least you all have a table that folks actually want to sit around. I am would still give my left arm to have 30 youth show up at our Sunday night youth group). And yes, even make space for the liberals, we’ll need a seat after you evangelicals actually practice what we have been preaching for so long! Wait a minute. Maybe there is still time!

Godspeed, adam davis

Student Minister

www.knollwood.org

Filed Under: emergent, engaging

Alexander Shaia on the Hidden Power of the Gospels: Homebrewed Christianity 78

April 28, 2010 by Chad Crawford 2 Comments

In this episode, Tripp interviews Dr. Alexander Shaia about his new book, The Hidden Power of the Gospels.

Dr. Shaia’s unusual approach combines anthropology, psychology, and ancient spiritual traditions to reveal that each of the four gospels focuses on a different spiritual question.

These questions form a recurring cycle that guides us through our spiritual journey.

Check out:

Here’s his main page Quadratos

AlexanderJShaia.com
BlueDoorRetreat.com
and Dr. Shaia’s Facebook Page

Purchase The Hidden Power of the Gospels: Four Questions, Four Paths, One Journey at Amazon.com

Thanks to Mike Stavlund and Michael Raimer-Goodman for calling in. Be sure and check out the new Baptimergent book. And call in to 1-678-590-BREW and leave us a shout out whenever you’re playing cornhole, the official game of the podcast.

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Filed Under: podcast

Yep, Mainline Leadership is Killing the Church (Reassessing a Previous Blog)

April 25, 2010 by Deacon Hall 12 Comments

I wrote a blog a while back called “Is Mainline Leadership Killing the Church?’ In it, I recommended that it be made canon law that all Episcopal Bishops take communion from a child once a year, that this act may bring some humility to at least Episcopal leadership and remind them whom they serve. (To his credit, one of my Bishops does take communion from a child once a year.) I stand by that statement. I want, however, in this blog to revisit the main question of the previous one with an answer I’ve become fairly confident about: mainline leadership is killing the church. To be more specific, Episcopal leadership is killing the Episcopal church.

The reason I bring this point up today is the following. I am a vestry member in my congregation (for those of you unfamiliar with Episcopalese, it means something like a board of Deacons), and we had our monthly meeting yesterday. Toward the end of it, our rector brought up the fact that the Diocese of Los Angeles has been pestering parishes to contribute to our new Bishops’ ordination ceremony coming up this May. Why? Because they want to have the “proper vestments” (including robes and rings), entertainment, and arena (we’ve rented the Long Beach Arena) for the occasion. Among other thoughts, I wondered for a moment if our leadership was stealing from the playbook of either Michael Steele or Lloyd Blankfein.

All of us were annoyed by this strong request; like many congregations, ours is running a deficit right now which we are only able to cover based on church investments…investments, mind you, that will be gone within a year. In fact, what such requests signify to me is that the leadership in the Episcopal church (and this may or may not stand with other mainline churches) is clueless. At a time the church is beginning to cave in on itself, they want to spend money on pomp and circumstance. Of course, such a move is, (to be rather explicit), rather masturbatory and self-congratulatory. After all, the church is relatively irrelevant as it stands in most other parts of today’s social fabric, meaning, the church won’t receive any congratulation except from itself. Forget, then, about spending money on proactive ministries like planting new churches and supporting a vibrant college ministry (ministries that could help to make the church, even if not the Episcopal, more relevant again) when we can have a party.

So, dear Episcopal leadership, allow me to remind you of some of the basics of which I, a parishoner and vestry-member, would expect you to have some cognizance.

1. We are all currently in a financial crisis, and we already give you 12% of our church income right now for, in my mind, blessing oil and water that God can probably manage to bless without you. Such insensitivity to the needs of your parishes signifies that you’re uninterested in your parishes. This just might be a problem since most people under the age of fifty stay in the Episcopal church, not because they received Bishop-blessed oil on their foreheads on special occasions, but because their parishes are filled with good, loving, Christian people.

2. In a similar manner, most persons within the Episcopal church (again, usually under fifty) have absolutely no a priori commitment to the Episcopal church as the Episcopal church. Again, these people are here because (1) they are committed to a stance of faith and (2) desire to enact those stances within particular congregations and parishes they find life in. Of course, that’s not to say that log-books of Bishops “proving” Apostolic lineage aren’t important; they are at a (purely) symbolic level. It’s just to say that they are not and cannot be the priority.

3. On top of all of this, I would like to remind the Bishops of their actual place in the church. You are pastors–or really pastors of pastors (2 Timothy 2:1-7). Nothing more; nothing less. In this regard, too, I would remind you that your sole purpose is to serve the rectors who serve the concrete parishes, that is, the parishes where the true life of the church manifests itself. If you don’t believe me, just look in the Book of Common Prayer and the order of who’s named last in the ordination ceremonies. Also, (God forbid this), you might look in the scriptures.

4. Finally, and with reference to this thought of looking in scriptures, I might remind you that, in our beginnings, we decided that the only compulsory acts we engage in are those found in scripture, though we’re certainly free to add any niceties, including robes and rings, if and only if we so desire and are able. When you are ordained for this position, then, you deserve the laying on of hands (Acts 6:6; 1 Timothy 5:22…depending on the version you read). However, you by no means deserve a ceremony that will come one step closer to breaking the bank of your flock.

With all that in mind, some of you might be wondering why I would desire to be a part of the Episcopal church. And it’s a fair enough question (as, certainly, right now, I sound far more on the emergent side of things). The truth is that I, too, have no a priori commitment to this ‘brand’ of church, even if I am firm in my faith and promise to serve in some congregation. However, I do think that the Episcopal church has something important to offer if it would open its eyes and ears to the truth of its own identity. That is, the Episcopal church, in continuity with its Anglican upbringing, has no absolute creedal code (the thirty-nine articles no longer function in this manner); rather, the church is held together, most obviously, through a commitment to a common liturgy. But what this lack of commitment to an exact creedal code need not signify is a dearth of intellectual movement (which is, unfortunately, where much, though certainly not all, of our current leadership is caught). Just the opposite…it can be a vibrant commitment to engage in open dialogue about the meaning of our a priori commitments to Christ (the sine qua non I’ve already expressed in a prior blog), all of which are brought together in a common liturgy where we worship with one another. In many ways, the insights of many emergent thinkers and more recent movements toward “big tent” Christianity are already nascently presupposed in the Episcopal identity.

Too bad we’ve focused on the Bishops.

Filed Under: bible stuff, philosophy, politics, thinking

Jigsaw Puzzle or House of Cards?

April 22, 2010 by Chad Crawford 2 Comments

Jigsaw Here is a sweet metaphor from The Economist article ‘The clouds of unknowing‘ last month:

Whether your impression is dominated by the whole or the holes will depend on your attitude to the project at hand. You might say that some see a jigsaw where others see a house of cards. Jigsaw types have in mind an overall picture and are open to bits being taken out, moved around or abandoned should they not fit. Those who see houses of cards think that if any piece is removed, the whole lot falls down.

When I read this quote I really dug it and didn’t know why until I realized the house-of-cards-ists reminded me of biblical literalists. But the article is about views on climate science between the scientists and deniers.

The defenders of the consensus tend to stress the general consilience of their efforts…the way that data, theory and modelling back each other up. Doubters see this as a thoroughgoing version of “confirmation bias”, the tendency people have to select the evidence that agrees with their original outlook. But although there is undoubtedly some degree of that (the errors in the IPCC, such as they are, all make the problem look worse, not better) there is still genuine power to the way different arguments and datasets in climate science tend to reinforce each other.

The doubters tend to focus on specific bits of empirical evidence, not on the whole picture. This is worthwhile…facts do need to be well grounded…but it can make the doubts seem more fundamental than they are. People often assume that data are simple, graspable and trustworthy, whereas theory is complex, recondite and slippery, and so give the former priority. In the case of climate change, as in much of science, the reverse is at least as fair a picture. Data are vexatious; theory is quite straightforward.

At least one person made the connection before me. Jonathan Hiskes from Grist made a similar observation in the ‘bonus point’ in his post on The Economist piece:

One reason why some people adopt the house-of-cards view is that they transfer the metaphor from fundamentalist religion. Fundamentalism requires that every single tenet of a holy scripture be true. If not, the whole apparatus topples. Hence the Biblical inerrancy view…the Bible is true not just as a whole, but in every single historical and scientific detail. Most Christians I know don’t have this literalist view of the Bible. And I’ll leave it to theologians to explain whether this view of scripture makes sense. But if your faith rides on such a belief, you’re likely to look at climate change in the same way.

It’s an intriguing observation concerning the overlap between (fundamentalist) evangelicals and global warming deniers. But I don’t know if it’s simply transfered from religion. That’s a chicken and egg scenario if I’ve ever seen one. House-of-cards tendencies can be found outside of religion and are probably deeply embedded in the human psyche. On the other hand, it might be reinforced through the conditioning of dogmatic teaching. My sense is that it has more to do with one’s circumstances in relationship to a given topic, whether it’s healthcare, economic injustice, LGBT issues, environmental policies … you get the idea. People can be house-of-cards types when it comes to the facts on one issue and jigsaw types on other issues.

Filed Under: engaging Tagged With: Christianity, climate change, environment, evangelicals, global warming

Listen to John Cobb on the 40th Earth Day

April 22, 2010 by Chad Crawford Leave a Comment

Forty years ago the first Earth Day was celebrated. Two years later, John Cobb was the first philosopher to publish a single-author book-length environmental ethics text about the ecological crisis.

John Cobb delivers the challenge at the UCC's Southern California – Nevada Conference on June 5, 2009

He has continued to speak and write about new ecological issues that weren’t known at the time he wrote Is It Too Late? A Theology of Ecology (1972). In June, he challenged the UCC to take as its mission working with God for the salvation of the world … with the environment as a focal point.

I’m not at all jealous that Tripp gets to grab lunch with Dr. Cobb down in Claremont any time he wants.

So I marked the morning of my 40^th Earth Day (well technically my 28^th) by listening to this recording from when Dr. Cobb visited Tripp’s class.

“We need to make use of technology, but that’s not going to solve the problem.”

John Cobb … Earth Day 2009 (MP3)

Filed Under: philosophy, thinking Tagged With: ecology

Leave Those “Big Tent” Doors Open (and I Might Come in)!

April 20, 2010 by Deacon Hall 1 Comment

I just read an interesting post by Philip Clayton talking about ‘Big Tent’ Christianity. His question is whether there’s still room enough in the American tent for the two sides of Christian faith we find in the States…the liberal and the conservative…to sit with one another. I must admit, I am not personally as concerned with this issue of unity as Clayton and many others, however much I’m open to letting them argue me into its importance. But, I am very concerned with the arguments used (sometimes openly; sometimes secretly) to deny the prospects of a “big tent,” namely, arguments that often center around the absolutization of certain politico-ethical stances. Those who argue against a big tent in this manner tend to confuse God with their own attempt to live a Christian life in front of God. In other words, they make an idol of their own life and its works by demanding they’ve figured the whole thing out. I, and hopefully others, beg to differ.

In this regard, I’d like to begin with a reflection on a not terribly popular theologian these days: Luther. In his On Christian Freedom, Luther makes what I think are two excellent point on the nature of a Christian ethic. On the one hand, he demeans those preachers who simply preach on the moral niceties of Jesus that we ought to follow. According to Luther, no external works free us from the bondages of sin; no external works can put us back into a right relationship with God. God’s work alone saves us, meaning any attempts to save ourselves through our work is already a sign of our sinfulness.

On the other hand, Luther is adamant that the elect (and, yes, he unfortunately has a notion of double-predestination) ought to enact the salvation they’ve already received by imitating God in Christ. He rightly interprets this point as being one of service to our neighbor, saying that, ’just as our neighbor is in want, and has need of our abundance, so we too in the sight of God were in want, and had need of His mercy. And as our heavenly Father has helped us in Christ, so ought we to freely help our neighbor by our body and works, and each should become to the other a sort of Christ, so that we may be mutually Christs, and that the same Christ may be in all of us….’

In general, I don’t think Luther needs to be taken at face value (even if I would hope he could be approached with intellectual and spiritual sympathy). But I do think that he illustrates an important point that I’m willing to uphold and apply to the numerous positions we find…liberal and conservative…in American Christianity.

First, I need to make a point that is a bit difficult for me personally to make since I fall pretty squarely (though not entirely) on one of these sides. Both liberal and conservative Christians can refer to something like Biblical precedent for their main concerns. To characterize these concerns entirely and unfairly, the conservatives have concern for something like personal and moral purity (especially in sexual terms), and the liberals tend (the side onto which I tend to fall) to concern themselves with systemic issues and social justice. That said, I don’t want to start an argument about which is the more important part; I simply want to acknowledge the Biblical precedent of both.

On top of this point, I could also say (as the new atheists are prone to parody) that there’s some precedent for genocide and other violent acts in scripture, meaning that, despite Christian desires to derive an ethic wholly and explicitly from the Bible, it may not be possible to do so. At least it is impossible to deny our use and dependence on extra-Biblical sources through which we comb-through the scriptures, accepting some portions and rejecting others. In this regard, conservatives, it might be said, are concerned with the Platonic tradition (especially his Phaedo) as applied to portions of Paul, namely, as living a life of personal moral purity; liberals, on the other hand, have taken certain sociological critiques and applied them to the Gospels, especially the Sermon on the Mount in the Gospel of Matthew.

Thirdly, what this above point means is that, Biblically speaking, we cannot take a lot of particulars on how to live and act. Really, the two most concrete commands are those preached by Jesus in the beginning of his sermon, namely, to love the Lord God with all your heart, mind, and strength, and to love your neighbor as yourself. As with Luther, I will take these commands to mean most generally that love of God impels one to serve one’s neighbor, and in serving one’s neighbor one acts out one’s love for God that has been given by God.

Fourthly, then, this point might mean that the absolute command given to Christians by God is quite simply to serve. But, at such a general level, any number of Biblical and extra-Biblical precedents can be, are, and must be, read into this command. I’ve outlined two characterizations above.

Finally, if we take Luther’s view with any seriousness, neither of the above ethical precedents can be engaged in in such a way that one is able to earn one’s salvation. Salvation is God’s job, which I take God to be enacting in Christ through the Holy Spirit, daily. God is bringing this cosmos, which is in a state of violence, entropy, and decay, to that vision pronounced in Isaiah 9; God is bringing the world and we in it through death into resurrection. Our works, then, are a response to, and a sign of the salvation that we (and I will go so far as to say all persons) have received, not that we earn.

What does this point mean? It means that we cannot turn the Biblical narrative and the God to whom it is connected into a propaganda; we cannot absolutize either of the above two ethical interpretations, even if we must do our best to interpret, follow, and argue for that command that seems Biblically unequivocal: to serve. Our particular interpretations of this command, then, do not bring us salvation; they are responses to the salvation we have already received. But this also means that, while there may be plenty of debate over which interpretation is the better, (which one is the better signifier and contributor to the salvation of the cosmos), neither our, nor our opponents’, nor this world’s salvation is up for grabs in this debate.

That said, to argue against the possibility of big-tent Christianity often implies one arguing for the absoluteness of one’s own position to such a degree that one must believe that one’s own position becomes the position to which all are called and upon which salvation rests. Drop that belief and the doors of the big tent are wide open.

Filed Under: bible stuff, politics, thinking

The Fascinating Life and Music of Kevin Prosch: Homebrewed Christianity 77

April 14, 2010 by Chad Crawford 4 Comments

Long-time friend of the podcast Mike Morrell partners with Homebrewed this week for this fireside chat (minus the fire, unless you count the Holy Spirit) with Kevin Prosch, a renowned singer/songwriter/instrumentalist who has traveled the world and influenced virtually every well-known worship leader in recent decades.

His story is incredibly fascinating … from his troubled relationship with his abusive father as a child, to stockpiling arms and being held captive by gold miners … with music being an important source of comfort throughout his early life. His conversion to Christian faith and involvement in the early Vineyard movement led to his career as a musician, both in recording Christian worship albums, and in the mainstream with his band The Black Peppercorns. But later he sold all of his equipment, feeling too broken and unworthy to continue, only to reemerge later restored to ministry at More Church in Amarillo, Texas, and visionary of the Music Coope Festival (June 9-11), where artists are coming together to create music in the context of community.

Find Kevin’s music at: TheMusicCoope.com

Songs featured in the episode are from Kevin’s recent live performances posted on his YouTube channel.

Thanks to Zach for calling in and introducing the book, Baptimergent: Baptist Stories from the Emergent Frontier. A book lots of my friends contributed chapters to, including Tripp. Stay tuned to the podcast to hear from more contributors about their chapters.

And thanks to Callid for his theory, the Nick Conspiracy. Hmm…something to chew on indeed. Find Callid Keefe-Perry’s sweet videos at TheImageofFish.com and be sure and see his sweet Theology after Google presentation.

Give a shout out on the Deacon Hotline at 678-590-BREW.

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Filed Under: podcast

Progressive Religiosity Just Gave Me a Headache

April 12, 2010 by Deacon Hall 7 Comments

I have a predicament. I am a progressive Christian, but I am pretty sure that progressive Christianity as it’s usually interpreted opens up a deep and anguishing pain in my heart, head, and soul! I think this is the case because I’ve read too much of the Bible and Barth lately, so maybe you all can help me and straighten me out.

Funnily enough, I’m not terribly sure that anyone could ever accuse me of being a great defender of Christian orthodoxy, at least not for its own sake. I do tend to think that, in the United States, theologians, pastors, and lay-persons alike have neglected the history and development of our tradition so that they might push their own agendas; but it turns out that these agendas are sometimes good, rightly calling into question previous Christian interpretations of what were once considered fundamental and irreproachable Christian doctrines. Then I read a blog today by Peter Laarman, both a very nice and intelligent man who is also the executive director of Progressive Christians Uniting; unfortunately, the blog signified for me precisely where current discussions of Christian identity, especially in the context of “progressive Christianity,’ have gone entirely wrong. I would like to take say a little about this.

First, Laarman’s blog has me questioning precisely what something like “progressive Christianity” has come to mean. If it means no longer confessing as a Christian, count me out. If it means confessing as a Christian…in the basic trust of God in Christ…to the best of one’s ability, arguing all the while that God doesn’t damn Muslims, homosexuals, and adulterers, and that God cares for the poor, then I’m in. So, I propose a basic terminological distinction between “progressive Christianity” (what Laarman calls his stance) and “progressive religiosity” (what I believe it actually is). I can affirm the first, but I’ve no interest in, as a faith stance, the latter. To confuse these two terms is a category mistake that demonstrates on the part of ‘progressive religionists’ two things: a lack of understanding of the basic Christian faith (and its intellectual reflection in theology) and, frankly, a degree of arrogance when it comes to (re)defining that faith.*

Laarman makes several points, which, in an entirely non even-handed manner, I’ll sum up as follows: “the Christian interpretation of God is merely one possible projection of human thought into God such that, if we were honest with ourselves, we could see through and reject to no small degree. We could then find solidarity with all other religious traditions by trading symbols and lies with one another about God, choosing for ourselves those projections which makes us feel the most progressive.” The basic trajectory of the blog, then, is to reduce Christian identity to a non-identity, annihilating the basic belief and trust that persons do not first come to believe by means of intellectual articulation, but that they already find themselves in a state of belief and, in some real manner, have no basic ability to stop believing even if they wanted to do so (and I’ve tried).

First, then, progressive religiosity rejects Jesus the Christ** as a, even the, unique expression of God. To put this statement into a broader context, I can fully buy into the blog that Philip Clayton wrote last week, which essentially claimed that there are several types of Christianity, none of which need be mutually exclusive of the others. I would add this simple point to Clayton’s reflections, one which I was gratefully able to tell Clayton myself: there is a sine qua non of the faith, a ground and affirmation that I can’t imagine doing away with and still calling myself Christian. What is that affirmation? An absolutely basic trust that God has definitively saved this world in Christ. I call it a trust because it is not even primarily a conscientious “belief,” an intellectual assent. One is passive in the original movement, which is a movement of God. Trust, rather, is quite simply a change of the heart by God such that God, in Christ, becomes the fount of all one’s activities…beliefs, knowings, and actions. We become (without importing necessarily the moral vocabulary) justified.

But it is important to affirm this basic trust in Christ, for if one reflects on it, it is precisely this trust in Christ that becomes important to the Christian. Whatever Christ may mean…however we might interpret him…God has acted definitively in him. All intellectual reflection on what this might mean, however important, is truly secondary to the trust we find ourselves to have through this bare and basic turning. Now, to be clear, this point need not mean that all intellectual interpretations of this basic point are co-equal. (Word Christology, in my mind, is far superior to spirit Christology, and hermeneutic Christology trumps both.) But there is much room for debate on these issues, so long as they’re issues taken seriously in the first place.

Secondly, progressive religiosity rejects the intellectual soundness of human belief in the nonsense that Christ is the unique expression of God. The basic point, then, is that progressive religionists cannot take this primordial and unwilled (at least by the person) trust in God through Christ seriously (I know I should add the Holy Spirit in here, too). And, if one does not take the Christian trust in God through Christ seriously, that’s okay; one does not need to do so, but certainly one is not Christian either. Neither can I fathom why one would want so ardently to hang onto the absurdities of our faith if one has no basic trust in God through Christ, unless for one of two reasons. (1) Progressives see Christianity as purely a tool for moving forward some sort of political agenda; but then “faith” becomes the worst form of political propaganda with no ties to that original trust which makes the whole thing viable as a political stance in the first place! (2) Progressives maybe secretly fear that, if they don’t admit nominally to being Christian, God will condemn them to eternal hellfire, and they want to ward off this possibility. Fear not, my friends, a good chunk of us believe God to be more just than this; plus, I suppose if you’re going, I’m probably going, too!

Tripp, I’m counting on you to come out as a Progressive Christian now, too. You’re up!

*On the other hand, I don’t doubt for a minute this is what my more fundamentalist friends say of me!

**When I say Christ, I mean the cross-dead Jesus and the resurrected one.

Filed Under: philosophy, thinking

The Clergy Sex Abuse Crisis: A Guest Post from John Sylvest

April 12, 2010 by Chad Crawford 8 Comments

I asked John Sylvest (@johnssylvest) of the Cathlimergent Network and ChristianNonduality.com to offer our readers some thoughts on the clergy sex abuse scandal and this is his response.

A Complex Reality

The clergy sex abuse crisis is a complex reality with many dimensions and a social ontology that includes many different types of stakeholders. Foremost in our hearts and minds are the victims of clergy pedophiles and ephebophiles, including their families and friends. There are the sexual offenders, themselves, both past and, God forbid, future, including their families and friends; we pray they have no future victims. There are clergy who’ve been unjustly accused and many others who feel shamed and tainted. There is a scandalized laity and a discredited hierarchy. There are lawyers and insurance companies. There are reporters and bloggers. There are those who’ve harbored animus toward different of these stakeholders for reasons both related and unrelated to the crisis itself.

The reality has many dimensions for all of these stakeholders: medical, psychological, clinical, moral, spiritual, legal (civil & criminal & ecclesiastical), temporal (the passage of time, statutes of limitations), financial, ecclesial, administrative, pastoral, practical and empirical (factual). There are critical relevant distinctions such as between laicization processes and sex abuse investigations. There are understandings that have evolved through time for clinical, civil and ecclesiastical authorities. There are new systems in place for protection, prediction, investigation, interdiction, and intervention. There are global dimensions as the crisis presented in the US, then Ireland, now Europe and very likely next in Spain, Latin and South America. There are demographic dimensions regarding the prevalency of pedophilia and ephebophilia in our populations at large and other institutions versus in the church.

Those in the media, including reporters and bloggers, may wish to investigate these different dimensions and discriminate between the various stakeholders and their interests. I hope all keep their primary focus on the victims and their loved ones and their interests. In our efforts to fix the blame and other collateral problems, let’s tend first to the victims’ healing.

Reasons for Hope

There is a tendency, even among the Catholic laity, but especially among outsiders looking in, to over-identify the Catholic Church with its clergy, magisterial teaching office and church hierarchy (the episcopacy and the papacy). There are about 5,000 bishops and a little more than 400,000 priests in the world. They are joined by over one BILLION lay Catholics. There is also a tendency to overemphasize moral teachings and political prudential judgments and to ignore the much more salient spiritual dimensions that play out in the Catholic life of prayer, worship and service. That’s a LOT of living and dying, working and praying, celebrating and serving! And this suggests an immense reservoir of goodwill and an incredible resiliency, not unaided by the Holy Spirit, that can triumph over any tragedy, transcend any scandal, including Crusades, Inquisitions, Papal Controversies and, yes, this Clergy Sex Abuse Crisis.

Who knew what when and did or didn’t do what when and where?

Gosh, I really hesitate to thus speculate!

So, foremost, let us pray.

Lord
help us seek out victims
help us provide appropriate interdiction and punishment for offenders
help us to recognize and repent of our roles as enablers
help us establish listening forums
help us bear witness to the pain
help us learn from our pain
help us remain in pain until we learn its lessons
help us admit our failings
help us apologize and compensate
help us provide healing resources
help us find and provide financial resources for victims
help us with our moral reasoning and prudential judgments
help us not to seek our own interests when competing values present
help us reform ecclesiastical structures
help us reform other social structures and institutions
help us disclose facts timely and transparently
help us establish accountability and responsibility
help us cooperate with civil authorities
help us to repent publicly
help us identify and admit to institutional dysfunctions
help us to recognize both institutional and personal sin
help us to identify, not only misfeasance and malfeasance, but, nonfeasance
help us identify our ignorance, incompetence and culpability
help us to resign our offices and ministries when appropriate
help us when unjustly criticized or accused
help us avoid the deflection of accusations with counter-accusations of animus
help us to avoid the shirking of responsibility and the blaming of others
help us to avoid jumping to facile conclusions and rash interpretations of facts
help us revisit any church disciplines or polity that may not have contributed to the cause of this crisis but which may very well become resources in moving us beyond it
help us as reporters, journalists and bloggers to be responsible and remain within our realms of competence
forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us
lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil
help us, even in our pain and sin, to sing your praises and seek your glory
heal us, reconcile us and make us one
protect our children, please, and work through us to accomplish their protection which is your supreme will
help us to bring a just resolution to our ecclesiastical crisis and give us the encouragement of Your Spirit to make whatever hard decisions and to take whatever difficult actions that might entail
we thank You and praise your Holy Name. Amen.

Filed Under: engaging

The Question of Authenticity and God

April 7, 2010 by Deacon Hall 1 Comment

Since I finished my Quals, Tripp’s been bugging me to begin posting on 19^thand 20^th century philosophical-theology. I gotta be honest, here: I’m really tired of reading and writing that kind of stuff. The truth of the matter is that I think Tripp just wants me to put my exams online so he doesn’t have to study for his. Instead, I’m going to continue posting a bit on my dissertation and where I’m going with it. Even though it’s general wisdom that only 3 people will ever read a dissertation, hopefully a few of you will find it interesting enough to be willing to converse with me on the topic.

To begin with, I’d like to make a statement about my last post. My basic premise in that post is quite simple: whatever the advertising world latches onto and uses for selling consumer goods sheds light on the ways in which that culture thinks and values. Because, in these previous commercials, advertisers latch onto a desire in our culture to form what we would consider “authentic” identities, we must take seriously as both a philosophical and theological category the notion of “authentic identity-formation,” or what I will simply call “authenticity” from here on out.

In this regard, I have been doing a lot of studies in Charles Taylor (the philosopher not the dictator) who takes up this notion of authenticity from a cultural and philosophical perspective. According to Taylor, the ideal of authenticity as a contemporary ethical standard has emerged from several historical idea sources, all of which have been taken over and setup as standards in their own right. So, the invention of individualism, the development of what will be called by Rousseau the ‘inner-voice of nature,’ and emergence of Romantic understandings of originality (none of which I will try to do justice to here) have all grounded the idea of authenticity. So, for Taylor, the idea of authenticity is latently understood and lived by us as drive to become an original expression of humanity through our making explicit what is potentially within us. To put it a bit differently, we’ve all been imbued with different and unique “talents,” and the ethic of authenticity moves us to strive to make actual these talents, both becoming and forming for ourselves what we already are to some degree.

At a properly philosophical level, Taylor develops this idea in an interesting direction. Philosophically, Taylor is highly critical of certain of our cultural appropriations of the idea of authenticity. Our appropriations tend to be solipsistic, narcisstic, self-centered; persons who explicitly desire to become authentic often do so in such a way that they use others and the world surrounding them to make for themselves who they are and want to be. But, according to Taylor, this appropriation of the ethic of authenticity is an aberrant one. To become authentic is never to become such at the expense of the rest of the world, especially our fellow human beings; to become authentic rather, is to become so in light of, and in conversation, with the world and our fellow human beings (what Taylor calls our ‘dialogical horizons’), especially our direct communities and cultures. To translate this critique in somewhat of the direction I want to take it, then, selfhood and the formation of individual identity depends on structures outside of the self that are irreducible to the self. And to become truly authentic, for both Taylor and me, is to create oneself with a cognizance of these structures.

I will not move, here, into the possibility of all these structures; such a task would have to match Hegel’s attempts to unify knowledge and being in his Encyclopedia (a task that I think impossible in the first place). But it is possible to say that there are certain of these structures that are contingent, for instance, that I was born in the Northwest of U.S. and was formed and formed myself in light of the possibilities afforded to me in that culture; There are, however, also such structures that are necessary (that if I’m born, I must die; death is a necessary structure in human existence). The question I’m explicitly interested pertains to God and God’s necessity, namely, does God form a necessary identity structure such that, if I am not cognizant of God, I cannot be an authentic human being. For reasons that I will explain more later, I’m answering no: authenticity is possible without cognizance of God precisely because God must be understood as that which is more than necessary.

At any rate, I hope these cryptic statements are at least of some interest to you; if not, I’m afraid that conventional wisdom is right: that only my committee and one other person will ever actually read my dissertation

Filed Under: media, philosophy, post-something, thinking